The naif style cover painting on Jon Dee Graham's debut disc for New West is of a single tree, branches stretching to the bright sky, clothed in yellow, orange and green. Is the tree bursting with early summer blooms, or slipping into gilded, golden fall? It's hard to say--and perhaps, given the songs within, it's some of both. For this brilliantly executed album sonically bookends summer, from the languid, but sizzling opening cut, "A Place In The Shade," to its cooler, more bleak final numbers, "October" and "Lucky Moon." In between, Graham takes us home, painting vignettes of remembered situations and encounters of the heart, and the restless urge when on the road to seek these out again, if only in memory. As he says: "Summerland is about returning to a place with some peace. It is an album about coming back." Even the cd itself is in the shape of a circular postal mark, identifying the place this music was sent from as "Summerland 93067."

Graham, from Quenado, Texas--a town of less than 400 souls that sits on the Mexican border just south of Del Rio and its famous "border radio" stations of yore--grew up listening to music and playing a folk/pop amalgam of roadhouse rock, country, blues and Mexican border pop in bands like the Skunks (a Texas underground punk outfit that, at one time, opened for the Clash); the True Believers (an early alt-country roots band with Alejandro Escovedo); John Doe (in his post-X career); and even Austin-based singer/songwriter Kelly Willis.

In 1997, Graham released his first solo album, Escape From Monster Island on Austin's Freedom Records. After touring with John Hiatt and Richard Buckner as an opening act, he returned to the studio to craft Summerland, with help from crack Austin musicians Rafael Gayol on drums, George Reiff on bass and Michael Ramos on organ. Together they have created a minor masterpiece of restrained, but inventive musicality coupled with lyrically intense poetics that works like an edgy Tom Russell might, or--better still--Jimmie Dale Gilmore and T Bone Burnett's classic 1996 evocation of the West Texas spirit, Braver New World.

Singing in a voice roughened by the road and reality, Graham paints his lyric pictures in a way that recalls Butch Hancock leavened with Richard Buckner and, in places, late night touches of Tom Waits. Like these artists, Graham balances his deceptively rag-tag musical exterior with seductive, pretty melodies and hooks--though he is pleased to tear the place up when the spirit moves him--as it most definitely does on the aforementioned "October" and "Lucky Moon."

The first few notes of the opening cut, "A Place In The Shade." drop the listener squarely into the steam and sweat of Summerland in July, where it is so hot "she cried at night in disbelief. . . I had to ask if it was sweat or tears shinin' on her cheek." From the 101 degree heat of this remembered summer romance, Graham uses loping Neil Young "Heart Of Gold" type guitar work to move us through the rueful insomnia of past connections--"between the ghost in the yard and the angel in the trees, roses in their beds get more sleep than me"--to the ominous dark beauty of "Look Up," in which his tired whisper is turned to (perhaps) false hope as he duets beautifully with Patty Griffin: "Look up, there's lightnin' in the clouds. . . . " What might be salvation is, instead, the savage power of storm, as we terrifyingly learn on the next cut, a turbulent, electric rocker, "Black Box," where romance crashes like a plane wild out of control, leaving its passengers mangled on the ground--"red meat and wreckage, two feet deep in the field. . . oh, once upon a time I wondered, now I guess I know how it feels."

Later on in the summer things lighten up with "Butterfly Wings," a brave new ascent into love on these fragile wings, accompanied by sparkling acoustic guitars and simple, happy lyrics--"she's as pretty as a butterfly wing, she's as pretty as that." But the summer is nearly over--the sweet darkness of nostalgia and the end-of-summer dance is approaching, as B-3 organ and Wurlitzer piano introduce the lush, Latin-tinged "At the Dance," with its litany of dance kings and songs: "The Royal Jesters from San Antonio. . . Joe Ramos y All Stars, Featuring Chicago Joe. . . meet me at the gym, we'll listen to the band at the dance."

Then, the chilll of fall begins to seep into Summerland, with the spare electric rock notes of "October" pricking the lyrics, as the singer falls, falls, into the arms of October--"Bury me in a pile of dead leaves, put two pennies on my eyes. . . I died of October": then, spiritually, is reborn, following the swallows "wherever they fly, riding the chimney smoke up into the sky, when the cold wind blows, you'll know that it's me passin' by."

In the end, the singer is on the road again, with his memories, both sweet and scarifying, held inside as talismen to guard and guide him on his travels, as he rides the tough, muscular guitar riffs of "Lucky Moon" across this dark, but moonlit, land.

With Summerland, Joe Dee Graham has not only brilliantly captured both the yearning and nostalgic glow of that romantic past to which we can never return, but he has also taken a hard look at that past, and captured its terror and heartache as well. To sing of the pain of the past--and home--as well as of its lost joys, is a mark of maturity that many artists take a full career to reach. Jon Dee Graham is already there.